…my choice of psychoanalysis was inspired not only by the hope of intellectual benefits as will become clear in due course, but also by a secret need to replace my dead father in some way so that the battle, if there had to be one, could be joined with a living, rational being and not with a memory or something similarly indefinable and elusive, like a dead father in fact, and though at the beginning my secret needs weren’t very clear to me, the transference-phenomenon was precisely the first thing that worked, that is, the transference of my affections and not, as some might imagine, the elimination of the dead father and his effective and convenient replacement by another person, since psychoanalysis doesn’t aim at this, and couldn’t do it anyway, and in effect the treatment simply wants to make us aware of the problems and conflicts buried in our unconscious so that when we unexpectedly have to face them, maybe in quite different guises, we are not scared out of our wits.
The protagonist explains magnanimously that psychoanalysis is exactly like a confession to the priest, except that you must pay money for it… He sees that in many ways he is similar to his father and this semblance starts turning into an obsession…

…I began to examine my profile more carefully making use of two mirrors and at times even three carefully arranged, studying with a hostile attitude the fatal resemblance…

He keeps recollecting his life as if he’s lying on the psychoanalyst’s couch… His childhood… His medical misadventures… The story of getting married and becoming a parent… His professional worries… Finally he is defeated by hypochondria and becomes a feeding trough for all sorts of medicos… Then to all his mishaps the psychoanalysis is added… And his lingo turns into a really phantasmagorical claptrap…

…I seem to have grabbed this Superego defunct father father memory father inheritance of duty and honor, when I’ve grabbed it and have it with its back to the wall, at a moment when I’m not looking it rummages in my unconscious and brings up long-forgotten sins and griefs and throws them at me by way of the colon or the lumbars, and it unleashes on me its anxiety attacks to bury me in my terror and in my finally admitted incapacity.

Uptightness and phobias are the road that lead not to happiness but to frustration.